“Aren't You of More Value Than These…?”

Matthew 6: 25-34,  Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Dr. Charles J. Tomlin

3rd Sunday After Pentecost, June 25, 2017,    (Series:  Questions Jesus Asked  #2)

My Grandfather’s farm was right beside the Statesville Airport.   So, you are right to guess that I came to love airplanes.   I used to spend every first quarter I got on a new wooden or plastic airplane that I could go outside and fly.  One of my favorite Christmas toys, as a child, was my own roll-out airport, with airplanes.  I loved to build model airplanes too. 

When I was about 8 or 9,  I took my new, small, blue plastic, rubber band, slingshot powered plane into the back yard to see how high I could make it go.  As I mastered how to launch it, I learned to let the wind take farther and farther, until finally it got so high, I didn’t see where it landed.  I searched and searched the yard and nearby field.  I’d lost toys before, but this was the very first day.  I couldn’t believe I lost it.  I thought I saw where it must have landed, but it was nowhere to be found.   So, I took up flying kites and lost a few of those too.

All of us have lost something valuable in our lives, but the hardest, most valuable treasure we ever loose are those we love.   And sometimes it’s hard for me to look in my own house today and see my Father’s eyeglasses, or see my mother’s picture and try to understand how these ‘things’ are still around, but they are gone.  How could “things” in life, like photos, metal, rocks, and materials, outlast the precious people we have loved more than anything else?  

Of course, we all enjoy using some of the high-tech items being developed today, but wouldn’t we much rather have some of the ‘warmth’ of days gone by, when people looked each other in the eye and talked?   Sometimes we don’t realize what we are missing, but when we do, we might also come to ask ourselves: did the creator make mistake by making materials seemingly permanent, but life and love way too fragile?  Does God really, really care?  Our lives can seem so brief, so transient, so fleeting ‘like a vapor’ as the Scripture says, which is way, way too delicate?

When we think about this second question, a question of ‘value’, we are asking ourselves one of the very important questions Jesus once asked:  Are we not of more value than those small, little things in life, like birds and the flowers?  Are we not worth more than they?

DON’T WORRY

By asking us to ‘look at the birds of the air’, Jesus wants us not to ‘worry’ about our lives.  Do birds help you not to worry?  The Audubon Society estimates that 80% of certain species of birds die every winter.  Birds can get hit by cars, run into windows, have their nests blow out by storms, or even have predators waiting on their little ones, as soon as they fall out of their nest.  When you watch birds out your window, or you feed them, they seem to be scrambling for food almost every moment.  And I know that lilies be beautiful, even the perennial varieties still must hide from the harsh winters, and as Jesus himself says,  ‘the grass of the field is ‘tomorrow cast into the oven’.   Why would Jesus use these always hungry birds and delicate flowers as pictures of God’s care for us?  How can we not ‘worry’ in a world that is as precious, but also as transitory as ours? 

And, what about our world?   Of course there is so much good in it, but what about all this bad we also have to hear, see, and know about, and sometimes, experience.   Yes, most of the time the storms, troubles, murders, and terrorists are over there, but occasionally, they are also here.  I was driving right on the edge of that storm that grazed Hamptonville in May, which was also part of the same storm that was a bigger tornado in Courtney.  We saw the result of the deadly forces in those dark winds.   None of us are completely shelter from the threats, the dangers, or the deadly forces set loose in our world.  

Of course, much of what is most worrying in this world is humanly instigated, but there is even more negative, destructive power in an earthquake, a tsunami, a tornado, a flood, or in a hurricane when they suddenly appear, often with little warning.   We have not tamed all the negatives, physical or political, and this is not even to begin to mention the mental illnesses, the political divisions, the moral decline or the social unrest that seems to be brewing.  How can we not worry?

But we need to realize again, that in Jesus’ day, there was plenty to worry about too, if not more.  There were totalitarian governments, marching armies, religious oppression.  At times, if you were living in Palestine, you could occasionally find someone outside the town, hanging crucified on a tree, with the birds eating away their flesh away.   Now, that would be a ‘threatening’ world, wouldn’t it.   Still, it was exactly in that very world, by the one who was later crucified himself, that we hear him saying,  “Take no thought for your life” (KJV), (or Don’t worry, NRSV) about ‘what you shall eat or drink, or your body, what you will wear” (6:25).   The Father feeds the birds.  The lilies of the field’ outshine Solomon.  The pagans (Gentiles) worry about ‘all these things’ (6:32), but you shouldn’t.  Why shouldn’t you or I worry?  Yes, of course, we worry anyway, but Jesus says we shouldn’t.  Why?

  

YOUR HEAVENLY FATHER KNOWS

Before we get to the ‘answer’ Jesus gives, we need to look at how many questions he keeps firing at those who would worry.  There are five of them that keep coming, one by one:  “Is not life more than food, the body more than clothing “ (25)?   “Look at the birds…are you not of more value than they” (26)?   “Can any of you, by worrying add a single hour to your life-span” (27)?  “Why do you worry about your clothing” (28)?  “If God clothes the grass of the field…will he not much more clothe you---O you of little faith” (30)?   Five questions, one after the other, and then Jesus ends with the implication of what worry means—“O you of little faith”?  

“Worry is Atheism!” said the great Methodist Missionary, E. Stanly Jones.  Once, the great reformer, Martin Luther’s, observed his wife starting to wear black in public.   It was after the reformation had set the landowners and princes free from the controls of the Roman Catholic so they could all go after their own ‘fortunes’ without established, moral constraints.  “Why are you wearing black?”, Luther asked his wife. “O, haven’t you heard,” she answered.  “God is Dead!”  When you think of someone wearing black to express grief on the outside, what do you think a soul looks like, on the inside, when it no longer believes, no longer trusts, and no longer has any elevated, special place for faith in a God who knows and cares?  

This is the obvious answer Jesus implies with all his questions:  ‘Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things  (32).’   God knows.  God cares.  This is reason you shouldn’t worry.  This is reason you should keep faith.  This is the reason you should serve ‘wealth’ instead of God  (6:24), which is the real reason this whole conversation got started.   It all got started because people were so worried about life, they were ‘storing up treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume….’   The more they had, the more they had to keep up and worry about.   All these ‘things’ they were gaining, storing, and treasuring, was not relieving their worry, but it was making them worry more.  They were putting their ‘hearts’ in the wrong place.  They were putting their lives at more risk by ‘having’ than by ‘letting go’.  

The other day, there was a woman who had a nice car at a gas station.  A car jacker tried to steal her car, so she got on top of it and wouldn’t let go.  I know it was a ‘subaru’, but would you put your life at risk to hold on to it?  She did.  Amazingly, the thief was so shocked that he let the car go.  It was rolling out of the service station lot and into the street.  She crawled off the car and stopped it from rolling just in the nick of time.   Would you put your life on the line for a car?   Even a nice one?  Now, if she was a mother with a child in the car, that’s different.  I didn’t see a child in the car.   It was a nice car, but was it that nice?

 Jesus says we are hurting ourselves and our faith by worrying, and by focusing ‘all these things’.   What can you really do, to add a moment to your life?  What kind of life did you have, after you worried about all that stuff?  It’s kind of like a mechanic neighbor, seeing you tinkering under the hood of your own car, asking “Do you know what you are are doing?”  Of course you don’t, not like he does?  And what do we know about solving our problems by getting, having, holding on, or by worrying.  Do we know what we are doing?  Are we accomplishing anything?  Of course not, so why worry? Jesus asks. 

Are you excessively worried about anything?   I just turned 60 this year.  I’m fast approaching retirement.  You’ve got to have X amount of money in the bank.   I’ve lived all my life on a pastor’s salary.  I’ve done some planning and some saving.  But I’ve probably haven’t done enough.   When I was in Greensboro I had a man in my church who was from North Iredell.  I don’t’ remember seeing him in church much.  His wife was sick and had to be placed in the nursing home.  I went to visit him and he said, “I’ve saved all this money.  I had quite a comfortable nest egg, I thought.  Now, I’m spending it all away is just a couple of years.  Pastor, do you know how much it costs.  I’d been better off not having any money at all.  Now, the nursing home is going to get just about all I’ve got left.   He was worried.  We all could worry about that or something else, couldn’t we?   What we have acquired, could be destroyed in a storm.  Who we love might have to go into a nursing home.  We could get very sick and have astronomical bills to keep us alive.   What do we have to worry about?  Jesus said, “Don’t worry!”  But we worry about a lot of things anyway, don’t we?

SEEK GOD’S KINGDOM AND HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS

The only real solution to all this worry is not a rebuke, but a choice.  “Seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you….” (33).  In other words, if you get busy doing the right things, you won’t worry as much about the bad.   If you keep your focus on the things that matter most, and what you should value most--those you love and the God who loves and cares for you--- these things will take care of themselves.

Of course we have to plan, of course we have to work,  and of course we have to invest and to follow some good financial and spiritual advise, but when it comes to ‘worry’ we also have a very important choice to make.   When I have visited a couple of financial planners in my life,  the number one question I bring to them is how can I earn or make a little money with my money?  They always seem to avoid my question, with another question they put to me first” ‘What do you want to accomplish?” “What are you going to do with that money when you earn it?   I find it interesting that even a “Financial Planner” thinks less about money than he or she thinks about ‘what you value’ or ‘what you want’?  

Jesus was not a financial planner; he was a spiritual realist.  He knew that any and everything in this life is ‘alive today’ and gone tomorrow.   So, why worry?  You can’t change the future or the reality we all face in life for death.   What we can do is focus on the most important things now.  It is much better to be making the right choices in the time you’ve got now.   You can’t serve God and money.  You can’t add an hour to your life by worrying?   The birds and followers are beautiful, but temporary too.   They get on with their living and dying, without worrying?  Perhaps we humans are the only ones capable of worry, but we are also capable of something else: We can make choices.   We can decide what we are going to do with our lives.  We can lessen our loads and make better choices.   We can plan for the worst and hope for the best.   We can do some good things today, and worry less about the bad that might happen tomorrow.  And most important of all, ‘we can seek God’s kingdom’, a kingdom that is coming that belongs to the future only God can bring.

What’s more?  We can also choose to trust God and his goodness, even in a bad world.   Or, we can make the other choice; we can no to hope, no to God, no to good, and wait for everything to get worst.  Like Martin Luther’s wife, we can listen to the ‘nay-sayers’ and start wearing black, because we have lost hope.  But Jesus asks this question about value, because deciding what matters in the ‘short’ life we have is a ‘decision’ that is up to you and to me.   The other day,  I saw on TV news a story about a child that was born with a disease that would not allow the child to have protein.  They were on TV because the child needed a kidney because they did not realize she had this problem until proteins ruined her system.   Now they need a kidney for her so she could have a higher quality of life.   The parents were optimistic and positive.   They were loving to their child, and their child was happy, completely unaware of the dangerous illness and condition she was in and would have to live with most her life.   I take my hat off to those parents who ‘choose’ to value their child, and life; and also to value love and being positive.   They know what we all should know:  When we decide what we value, or what matters most, we create the world we live in.   We decide how we will see it, face it or deal with it, whether it is bad or good.   When Jesus was on the cross, he too cried “My God why?”.   We all come to such dark moment.  But we have a choide.  We don’t have to stay there, stuck on a dark Friday afternoon, but we can keep moving ahead, waiting and believing that Sunday’s coming!  

“Don’t you know that you are of more value than these?”  Jesus asks us.  Don’t you know that the Father knows and cares for you?   We need to be amazed, not by the bad things that happen, but by the good we know, and the love we share, because of God’s love for us.   If God cares about birds, flowers, and exactly what you need, even before you ask,  Don’t worry!   Don’t worry about tomorrow, but live, love, and trust God today!   Seek the Kingdom and God will be there with you and for you, no matter what!    Amen.